3/4

         This week Smagorinsky offered some ideas that can be used for the upcoming unit plan. However, I don’t think it was a great help because I really would have wished that they were a lot more “unconventional” than he suggested.  Most of those activities are ideas that we’ve heard and talked before, and I’m sure there are other ways to engage and excite students about text beyond the activities we always turn to.  I guess its our job to figure it out.

            The Christenbury reading was also a little redundant and reminiscent of last semester. The writing she discusses is exactly what we’re doing in Dr. Bomer’s class. I am really surprised at how challenging that has been for me. I think it’s because I am forced to do all of the thinking and creating instead of having a rubric or topics laid out for me. I think this is great news for teachers and students. This style of teaching writing is challenging and rigorous and forces students to think about they’re writing way more than they ever have. I am very excited to do this in my own classroom because the end product is so refreshing. It’s like creating a piece of art, it is!

 One thing I did not like about Christenbury is how she dedicated a whole section to Shakespeare; I thought that was something we were moving away from. It made me think about the texts I’m thinking about for my classroom. Am I choosing them because they are great for the students or because they’re my personal favorites? I think it’s important that the text is both, not one or the other.  One thing I did really like is her mentioning drama as a way to learn and interact with literature.  I think this is funny, but the one class I took on Shakespeare during undergrad was called “Doing it”, and I loved it. The whole course was made of partners acting out all of the scenes in the selected plays and that is definitely something I’d like to do in the classroom because it allowed to connect with pieces of literature that I had previously despised.

As far as fieldwork goes, I noticed that my CT is a lot more direct and firm with her students, which I think is working in her favor. I don’t know if she notices but the students are responding well to it and that makes me very happy.